Controuge

BORN DIGITAL.
RAISED BY IDEAS.
FANS OF PLANET EARTH.

Founded 2016

About us

In 2014, TalalAlrashed, a hospitality consultant & a social media influencer established The Contourage brand to provide tourism, hospitality, food & luxury brands that approach him a vaster array of services — in addition to his social media exposure.

The Contourage was first incepted as social media management company only but grew its services to include marketing campaigns, social media strategy, Arabic content creation, managing brands & visual content creating.

In 2016, for Contourage to enjoy a more integrative range of services especially catered to attract the GCC & the Arabic speaking audience, it merged with a leading branding & creative Arabic content marketing company: Nawrass Media.

Since then, The Contourage has attracted more leading organizations & brands such as Jordan Tourism board, Taiwan Tourism bureau, Dubai Tourism, One&Only worldwide, Atlantis The Palm & The Dubai Mall, Marriott World Wide as well as consumers durable goods brands such as Infiniti cars & Philips and a variety of other brands.

As for the meaning of our name: We highlight & bring out to the public the contour (advantages, features & selling points) of a certain destination, brand, product or service for the right entourage ( visitors, customers, media & crowd) for them to come & experience it.

CONTOURE + ENTOURAGE = CONTOURAGE

Meet the founder

Hospitality, Media, Finance and Diplomacy are all fields Talal’s diversecareer is made of. After acquiring a degree in Accounting from KuwaitUniversity, working for one of the most prestigious organization in theworld: The Kuwait Fund for Economic Development, working for a majorinvestment bank in the region: Global investment House & moving toToronto to run a development project worth 80 million dollar, Talal hasdecided to shift his career to his passion: hospitality.

On 2011 he joined Glion Institute of Higher Education in Montreux, Switzerland & after that has joined top luxury hotel brandsto work for in different countries, until he moved to Dubai on 2013 to work for a DIFC restaurant: Gaucho,open his Instagram account to public & become one of the most reputed trusted social media figures inthe region.

Talal is also fluent in several languages besides his mother language Arabic, and English:Italian, French, Spanish & Turkish.

Known for being followed & trusted by the elites of GCC & some other Arabic speaking countries, luxurybrands has been approaching Talal to promote their products or create brand awareness for them, startingwith the most luxurious mall in the region: the Galleria Mall Abu Dhabi that has nominated him ambassadorof fine dining restaurants when he had only 23K followers, to Ritz-Carlton that chose him as a Globalinfluencer when he had only 39K followers (according to Vienna’s property, a reservation from a royalfamily was made right after Talal’s stay & one member of the family stated they made the decision basedon Talal’s recommendation on snapchat), to Fly Dubai for promoting their business seats.

According to Jordan Tourism Board, Talal came recommended by the most elite family members in Kuwait& UAE; he is known to be the only social media figure affluent families trust for restaurants, hotels &lifestyle brands; Phillips, infinity and Scotch & Soda are other brands that have hired TalalAlrashed toparticipate in campaigns to promote Phillips’s first coffee machine, Infiniti’s new Q60 car & Scotch &Soda’slaunch in Kuwait. Talal is active also as panel speaker in luxury & PR conference, he was for two consecutive years, 2016 & 2017, a key speaker in Arab Luxury World Conference discussing & sharing hisinformation about the art of promoting luxury brands through social media, also he was in PR summits in Istanbul & in Manama speaking about the transformation of the PR world from press to digital & Social
media.

In Contourage, Talal’s role is mainly social media management, assisting the brands in sourcing, selecting, communicating & negotiating with other influencers, creating content &consulting.
He is also running theevent arm of the company which mainly arranges Contourage dinners, as well as curating events cateredfor the client’s business goals or targeted audience.

We have our team members & network we work with spread over the region, here in Dubai, in Kuwait,Beirut, Morocco, India and Casablanca. We enjoy the wide array of facilities the social media is giving usand through technology we work with people from all over the world.